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International Security

Decisive measures must be taken by nations and international organizations to ensure mutual survival and safety. In the past several years, key governments and multilateral institutions have devoted considerable effort to the task of more effectively integrating development and security policy responses to the related challenges of countries affected by conflict, post-conflict peacebuilding, and conflict prevention. The looming deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, has focused attention on this important nexus and the near impossibility of crisis- and conflict-affected states achieving these goals unless development and security is more effectively integrated. Despite progress on several fronts, including at the United Nations and at the international financial institutions, developing policy for effective development and security engagement remains a challenge in both conceptual and operational terms – not least because discussion of political, security, economic, and humanitarian issues traditionally has occurred in different multilateral fora, among different sets of stakeholders.

Consequently, coherent and integrated development, security and political support to countries emerging from conflict has proven difficult. Organizing the international response around early support to economic recovery, livelihoods, and services, and the core task of statebuilding has proven a greater challenge. Core political, security, economic, and humanitarian tasks are carried out by an ad hoc and fragmented array of bilateral and multilateral development actors. CIC’s focus is to aid global actors in creating more effective and everlasting security.

Related Publications

Since 2008, energy and food markets—those most fundamental to human existence—have remained in turmoil. Resource scarcity has had a much bigger global impact in recent years than has been predicted, with ongoing volatility a sign that the world is only part-way through navigating a treacherous transition in the way it uses resources. Scarcity, and perceptions of scarcity, increase political risks, while geopolitical turmoil exacerbates shortages and complicates the search for solutions.

The violent Basque separatist group ETA took shape in Franco's Spain, yet claimed the majority of its victims under democracy. For most Spaniards it became an aberration, a criminal and terrorist band whose persistence defied explanation. Others, mainly Basques (but only some Basques) understood ETA as the violent expression of a political conflict that remained the unfinished business of Spain's transition to democracy. Such differences hindered efforts to 'defeat' ETA's terrorism on the one hand and 'resolve the Basque conflict' on the other for more than three decades.

In West Africa, civil wars have receded, democracy has gained ground and economies are growing. But a destructive new threat is jeopardizing this progress: with local collusion, international drug cartels are undermining our countries and communities, and devastating lives.

Past Events

This high-level dialogue will underscore the power of multilateralism to address the world’s most urgent challenges, among them, climate change, sustainable development, protracted humanitarian crises, large-scale human rights abuse, and threats to international peace and security. They are complex, global, cross-border issues that countries cannot address on their own.

Bringing together the Presidents of the General Assembly, ECOSOC, and the Security Council, the dialogue will underscore the value of discussing development, peace and security, and human rights in support of collective objectives.

Non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) are now the dominant form of contemporary warfare, substantially outnumbering traditional inter-state armed conflicts (IACs). UN Security Council practice is not a source generally cited as evidence of norms regulating NIACs. Descriptions of the Council as an essentially “political” body have been used to suggest that the obligations it imposes form no coherent pattern and have little relation to otherwise applicable rules of international law.